[Xmca-l] Re: Fate, Luck and Chance

[Andy Blunden]

Thank you for that journey, David. To tell the truth, I had never before 
reflected on the relation between fate, luck and chance!

Looking at two passages, two issues which have come up here recently 
together:
Vygotsky's words on signs and tools (and other mediating elements) in 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1931/research-method.htm#sign-tool
and his words on words and actions which Haydi drew our attention to in 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/1934/tool-symbol.htm#s25

In both cases I think he is combating the then-fashionable (in the USSR) 
labour paradigm in psychology and anthropology, that is, taking the 
labour process as the archetypical relation. In the light of the later 
development of Activity Theory, his words were prescient.

As you suggest, any attempt to distinguish between sign and tool or 
between word and act, "logically," that is, according to their various 
attributes, is hopeless. What is more, such a "logical" approach seems 
to lead to the conclusion that word is a special *type of tool* (or 
artefact) and speech a special type of action. He shows how mistaken 
this is, and the key concept is that the two concepts are related not 
"logically" (or typologically) but genetically, that is, according to 
the relation between their distinct but related paths of development. 
Just as he explains in Thinking and Speech, in relation to thinking and 
speaking: http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch04.htm#s2a
Actions (or tool use) on one hand and word-use on the other hand have 
separate roots and up to a certain point have separate lines of 
development, but once they come into "contact" with one another, the 
development of each is raised to a higher (human) level, and conversely 
and for each of the pairs of concepts. And then beyond a certain point, 
both forms of action develop along distinct, even divergent lines, even 
while they have become quite inextricable from a logical or typological 
point of view.

It was formulations like this, bound to be misunderstood in the years 
after he died, which laid him open for the utterly false accusation of 
"idealism", and the failure to grasp the relation between the two 
related concepts by some of those who came afterwards, led them into error.

Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


David Kellogg wrote:
> Last weekend, like most of the population of Seoul, I left the city to
> go down to the countryside. It's the traditional moment when people go
> to their ancestral home, meet with members of the whole family, and
> make a whole truckload of cabbage into kimchi for the winter, dividing
> it up for all the members of the extended family to take home, so I
> went to visit some old friends and look at new paintings (as well as
> eat the new kimchi before the fermentation has taken the crispness
> from the cabbage and the bite from the garlic and red pepper).
>
> As we were scrabbling for parking spots outside a popular noodle
> restaurant, I used the Korean word for "fate" to mean "luck", and
> everybody laughed, because I had inadvertantly implied that my
> ancestors had somehow designated that particular parking spot for us.
> I still maintain it was not my fault--the two terms are quite similar
> in Korean, and even in English they are rather hard to separate out
> semantically without referring to concepts like "subjective" and
> "objective".
>
> Many thanks to Andy for the posting Chapter Two of the History of the
> Development of the Higher Mental Functions. It is an incredible roller
> coaster ride, but I have always believed that it is the most important
> thing on fate, luck, and chance--and even on language--that Vygotsky
> ever wrote, even though it hardly mentions language at all.
>
> As I noted earlier, Vygotsky doesn't use the term "artifacts".
> Instead, he uses the term "rudimentary functions" to describe things
> like drawing oracular lots, tying mnemonic knots, and notching sticks
> to calculate numbers. Of course, these are, genetically speaking,
> artifacts: they are artificially made.
>
> But I think for Vygotsky what is important is not what is
> self-identical and constant but rather what changes. That's why he
> rejects the "logical category" approach to classifying both signs and
> tools as mediating activities, and that's why he insists that the
> precise genetic, functional, and structural relationship of tools and
> signs has to be worked out.
>
> So I think for Vygotsky what is important is the change in function.
> That's why he calls them "rudimentary functions" and not artifacts,
> and that's also why he insists that they have utterly lost the
> commanding, "fateful" authority they once had. In LSV's example from
> Tolstoy, Pierre Bezukhov forgets all about the message of the game of
> Solitaire he is playing to decide whether to stay in Moscow and kill
> Napoleon or join the Russian Army and be killed! We use these as games
> of luck and not as conduits of fate.
>
> It seems to me that at least some of the recent kerfuffle over Andy's
> statement that the "objective" is what is seen as not changeable
> through discourse by a given discourse community can be seen
> similarly. Pierre's decision is--quite literally--changed through the
> trivial discourse of his sister, because he recognizes that the
> outcome of the game is only luck, not fate.
>
> Such a change was not possible for the practitioners of "decimation":
> When a Roman commander wanted to punish a legion, he counted on this
> fingers, and if he pointed to you with his second pinky, you were
> bludgened to death, and you called it fate, not luck. These were
> people who necessarily took the distinction between subjective and
> objective more seriously than we do, but to a certain extent their
> distinction beteween fate and luck is the rudimentary form of our own
> distinction between the subjective and the objective.
>
> How does Pierre, and how do children, see that what they take as fate
> or magic or even skill is simply chance? Of course, the answer is that
> some of them never do: I am always a little astonished by my own
> ability to attribute a successful class to my own semi-divine
> erudition and conversely to blame an unsuccessful one on a diabolical
> conspiracy of sultry weather, late subways, and other people's ill
> temper. But I think that Vygotsky would find the idea that the child
> on his own simply sees through the idea of fate and luck and replaces
> them with the notion of chance rather intellectualistic: like the
> scene in the Wizard of Oz where Toto knocks over the curtain and
> reveals the Wizard as a wizened old circus balloonist speaking through
> a megaphone.
>
> I  prefer to think that language plays a vital role: the child learns
> to see that things that are made of language can be unmade by
> language, and in so doing tranforms fate into luck and then into
> chance. But the process is not a single revelation, and it comes as
> part of a much broader discovery that includes the ability to
> internalize almost any social discourse as a kind of mental grammar
> that is more individual, more autonomous and more "subjective".
>
> And so I think that Andy's formulation, although the butt of some
> ridicule by good people on this list who could not actually quote it
> correctly (I'm looking at you, Martin) is really correct: "objective"
> just means that something is seen as not subject to change by a
> discourse community, even where that discourse community consists of
> just me and my lonely self. That's why Vygotsky says that the
> 'internal" is simply the psychological, and the external the social.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>